Automobile manufacturing supply chain simulation in the GRIDS environment

A supply chain is the series of activities that an organization uses to deliver value to its customers. In today's competitive environment, the globalization of markets has rapidly substituted the traditional integrated business. The competitive success of an organization no longer depends only on its own efforts, but relies on the efficiency of the entire supply chain. Therefore, building an effective supply chain is fast becoming paramount in today's marketplace. Distributed supply chain (DSC) simulation has been identified as one of the best means to test and analyze the performance of supply chains. The Generic Runtime Infrastructure for Distributed Simulation (GRIDS) is a middleware that supports the reuse and interoperation of DSC simulations. We report the experience on employing the GRIDS to support the distributed collaboration of an automobile manufacture supply chain simulation. Several advantages of GRIDS are also discussed which make it ideal middleware for DSC simulations.